


the opposite of broken is something empty

by metaandpotatoes



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Character Study, Existentialism, Future Fic, Gen, M/M, Otabek Altin-centric, Retirement, metaphors gone wild
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-05
Updated: 2018-05-05
Packaged: 2019-05-02 09:57:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14542227
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/metaandpotatoes/pseuds/metaandpotatoes
Summary: Otabek thought he could jump high enough to launch himself into orbit.The alternative, it seems, was to fall to pieces.(Otabek has learned that there are different types of breaking. One evening in Tokyo, after yet another failure to capture Grand Prix gold, it all comes to a head.)





	the opposite of broken is something empty

**Author's Note:**

> There can be a real meeting between two people at  
> the point where they always felt marooned.  
> Right at the edge.
> 
> —Sam Shepard, Two Prospectors

#

“If you weren’t so desperate to rip yourself to shreds, you might’ve beaten me for once.”

Otabek almost can’t make out Yuri’s words over the sound of the motorcycle. It sputters like a broken heart as he slows to a stop in the Tokyo night.

The world goes red. When he looks down, Otabek can only catch pieces of Yuri: the sun-bright flash of his hair in the windscreen. Eyes shifting in a side mirror. A crescent of hand falling open across Otabek’s thigh.

The light changes. Otabek imagines he can feel the warmth of Yuri’s cheek on his back through his leather jacket, but really, all he can feel is the bite of Yuri’s helmet sinking into his shoulder and the hard rim of a gold medal pressed into his spine as Yuri’s arms clasp tight.

Would the city lights stream right through the cracks of him if those arms squeezed too hard?

#

Maybe, Otabek thought as he watched Yuri from the boards—watched the ease with which Yuri danced into some form wholly other than what Otabek knew him to be. Firebird: Dawn-wrent, radiant, blazing molten wings robbing evil of its soul. Never could Otabek inhabit something so otherworldly and unforged. Couldn’t even imagine it on his own.

All he’d been able to make of himself—wrought iron. The seams showed, bulbous and cruel.

Maybe, Otabek thought as he watched Yuri in the cold light of the rink, maybe determination was never going to be enough. The idea pooled in him, cooled in him around some invisible core. He held it there, plumbed it until it burst and sent him spinning across the abyss of a dream: Higher, longer, approaching infinity.

#

Otabek thought he could jump high enough to launch himself into orbit.

The alternative, it seems, was to fall to pieces.

#

A fable, from when Otabek was small and scared and still shared his mother’s bed:

The hero, as yet unbeknownst to himself, is wandering across the steppe, buffeted by endless wind. He has nothing more than his loyal horse in tow, having abandoned his family after a curl of breeze slowed and whispered of riches lurking within the teeth of the earth beyond the horizon. The hero has heard of mountains, and of the sea whence the world’s breath churns, but he has never before thought to seek them out for himself.

He walks for three days and three nights, until the wind robs him of sight, turns the world white, and encases his horse in ice. At dawn of the fourth day, the hero’s horse takes a step and shatters.

“You promised me riches,” the hero cries to the wind even as it steals his breath. “Now I am truly with nothing.”

The wind does not slow to answer. The hero, still blinded, cannot see that the shards of ice are diamond. When he falls to the ground and touches them, they cut his hands. His blood soaks the white ground black and he turns to mountain, burying oil and riches at his core.

The world beyond his borders grows quiet. The wind stops now, to embrace him, to call him by his name, and it spares the steppe its endless winter.

Otabek thinks of the hero, sometimes, when he steps on to the ice and into the white noise of a crowd.

#

Whenever he comes crashing down, he thinks only of the perverse pleasure of breaking.

#

The hiss of Yuri’s shower fills their tiny hotel room. Otabek sits on the edge of the bed and pores over his scoresheets, sorts through the numbers ringing in his head. They crumble into nothing.

“Fuck,” Otabek says, clutching the papers into a ball. The adrenaline is wearing off. A familiar ache winds around the top of his foot and up his leg, dissecting him into pain and finitude.

He bends down to pull an orange bottle out of his bag, fishes out two pills without a sound, then stows the bottle silently back into the safety of his sneakers. He can take the painkillers without water now, so long as he goes one at a time.

When the shower shuts off, Otabek grabs his leather jacket from the desk chair and leaves.

#

“Mr. Altin,” a reporter asked. “Mr. Altin, do you believe you can become the first to land a quad Axel in competition? How long have you been training to land it now?”

Every day for the past six months has been the same. A fight to stay standing in a ring made of mirrors. A fight to escape unscathed when all he knows to do is punch.

When did his body become the enemy?

#

A decade ago, watching the others wind themselves into perfection in the glass of the dance studio, Otabek learned: He could not bend far before breaking. The only solution was to become as hard as the glint in Yuri Plisetsky’s eyes.

#

So Otabek steeled himself. Ice-forged, hammered strong by gravity’s inevitable pull. All to go spinning four and half times through air, only to come down even heavier than before. Never weightless.

He felt powerful succumbing to the falls, felt the excess being chipped off of him until he was polished and more himself. It was a matter of speed, of height—of honing himself down to the thin, invisible axis drawn through him by God, held up by sinew. Bone. Stubbornness.

All can be broken.

#

“The fuck you going to pieces over?”

Yuri’s voice echoes off the parking garage walls, and for one terrifying moment, it sounds like there are a million of him. When Otabek looks up from the map on his phone, though, there is only one, bearing down on him and his bike, a string of curses half-formed on his lips.

“Just let me be,” Otabek says before the obscenities break free. He imagines them crowding the cage of Yuri’s mouth, cutting at the soft skin of his cheeks and tongue until they’re raw.

Yuri’s lips tighten. Purse. His face always looks hardest when he’s on the verge of breaking. When he turns and walks back into the hotel without another word, Otabek stops himself from calling his name. He cranks the engine to life in case he does anyway and slides out the garage a cacophony.

#

His music—fragmented at first—built. Apotheosis never happens straight out the gate.

Otabek built himself, too, jump after jump, on a throne of air and the high of his own power. Willed himself to stay afloat a fraction of a second longer before the inevitable decline—a nadir of do or die.

This building—endless, a structure to spite his mother's God—no bricks or mortar, just note on note, sinew on sinew, until finally—the long glide in. Strings stalked into a buzz. He stepped. Gave way to the requirements of gravity. The world paused when he swung his arms back. Set himself free from the ice. For a moment, everything spun fast enough for him to forget it.

Then the world split in an instant. Or did he?

The world hadn’t moved. It would never move for him. The only space to be made at the core of him, up the scaffolding of his being, fast shattering. He wished it would all come crashing down.

#

He has thrown himself to the ground a thousand times, hoping just once he could ascend to a sky of his own making.

#

He saw Yuri fall, once, running up the steps of the Seine. Otabek has seen him fall many times, of course, but this is what he imagines to be the first. They had been drunk—had drank an entire bottle of wine wandering down the banks of the river to console themselves as they fled the other skaters running amok in the 12th arrondissement. Under Notre Dame’s stained shard gaze, Otabek dared Yuri to race to the glittering glass pyramids of the Louvre.

When Yuri fell, Otabek was terrified that he would cry. Not out of shame or guilt, but because for the first time it dawned on him that Yuri was something that could crash to the earth and shatter. How could he console someone of that?

#

In the locker room, Otabek abandoned any hope of taping himself together again. Instead, he stared dumbly down at his hands until—tears streaked along them.

#

“What happened?” Yuri asked, waiting to take his place on the podium. Otabek waited to watch, though he would not look up.

#

It’s mathematically incorrect, this loss, the size and shape of it. The space where it’s broken off. Otabek carries it with him as he steps out of a stuffy club and into the expanse of winter stretching through the shards of the Shimokitazawa backstreets. A buzz insulates him from the cold enough that he loses himself in the cloud of his breath and walks right past his bike.

He stops at an intersection, pulls out his phone, and starts to type, numbers once again clear in his mind. The anger stretching up the screen, though, cuts him short. He tries not to look at Yuri’s messages as he deletes his, character by character, certainty fracturing under the weight of something human and insurmountable.

Otabek looks up. An ultraviolet night rises up empty from the claustrophobia of buildings lining the street. Snow slices down across the dark windows and shuttered shops, nothing but shadow. He imagines they step back and away, retreat behind a curtain of power lines to bow in honor of his solitude.

Standing there it strikes him: It’s the first time in five years he’s spent the night after a Grand Prix Final alone.

#

That night in Barcelona five years ago was strange—the first night he and Yuri spent together as friends after facing each other in competition. Maybe Otabek should have been bitter or mad, but the reality is that he was filled with nothing but awe at this kid who could transcend himself on ice.

Otabek had wanted to be alone then, too. He wanted to retreat into the only other person he had managed to learn how to become in between rink and home—a hand guiding a beat, anonymous behind the glass of a DJ booth. Instead, there was Yuri—first, glinting out of the crowd of the club like some sort of precious metal, then folded carefully into the warmth of his coat against the chill, wrestling with what to become in front of the world.

Otabek had never thought to become before. That night, standing between the black of the sea and the sky, watching Yuri break bigger from the flames, he knew Yuri was never-ending. Like standing in the sun.

#

“Out there, you can be anything,” Yuri said.

Otabek doesn’t remember the before or after, just the impossibility.

#

The first time he skated—no. His memory fractures, merges into fiction.

The first time he saw Yuri, in that ballet class ten years ago—saw in the refracted light emanating from him the extent of his own limitations, the possibilities within them.

The first time he won. Disbelief mixed with an unwavering sense of what lay ahead.

The first time—he won’t think of that now, he tells himself. No—no more firsts.

The first time he reached an end and stopped at its precipice, trapped now.

No more firsts.

#

One morning, soon after moving from Almaty back to Toronto, Otabek caught his reflection in the glass of the rink (its imitation, really; an approximation, not quite broken open by the smack of pucks again and again against the unbearable surface)—and saw nothing but fault lines.

He inhabited them like some other world, lived in them until he could think of no other reality beyond their fragile borders. He walked them like the dark fields of the calligraphy that lined his mother’s walls, a mystery broken only by the sense of the vowels clustered around it. The space between hard, crashing consonants and the silence of meaning blinding white beneath glass.

#

He peered into his computer day after day, looking for evidence of what the glass projected onto his skin. He wondered if Yuri could see. Kept the bruises and braces and bottles of pills out of view.

#

Lying on the empty ice, Otabek stared up into the paltry tin ceiling of the rink for the first time. How had he never noticed before?

#

Taking refuge from the fracture and sprawl of Tokyo's streets, Otabek slips into the hot grasp of a sento, slides all the way under the water and convinces himself he is not there. No one else is, after all. The pain leaching out of his bones—dull again, sharpening—tethers him to matter.  


#

“I feel so heavy,” he admitted, only once, stumbling out of an Almaty club. His arm dropped from where it was draped around Yuri’s waist. He listed into the width of an empty street.

In the club, the music propped him up like bellows, beats resounding in petals of perpetuity to magic something whole. The silence of the street, he remembers, was deafening, so much so that he could not hear what Yuri said in response. He didn’t fall, though. He was held up. Held together. They were together, in that walk from nightlife to home.

#

On his balcony, a cigarette, for the off-season. Tendrils of smoke whispered to him of things nearby. Not so heavy now, light with nicotine and feeling. With the possibilities lying behind him. If only he could turn and take them.

#

“What happened?” he asks the streets. His voice is eaten by the empty.

#

He flew a half a world apart again and again. He wanted to break the world into halves and halves and halves and—.

Maybe then nothing would be separate.

#

As Otabek sunk deeper into himself, he imagined Yuri a dark shape above him. Pressing into him. Would he give?

#

Otabek sheds himself across the city as he goes in search of his bike, casting off the here and there. He imagines leaving his pain in the well of a vending machine, tucking his ambition into the soil of a plant. What about his love? His fears? He lets them slip from him and down to the underground, lets them free into the city’s unbroken brightness.

Even if someone found it all and taped it back together again, he would not feel complete  

#

Pieces are as unnavigable as any ice field. The things that drift out to sea between two people—lifeline or dissolution? Parts of themselves. Detritus, drifting out of orbit.

#

Back in the hotel room, Yuri’s body sprawls across not-his-bed. Light cuts through the still-open shades and over the facets of his bare back, carving him into something multitudinous and strange. Igniting him.

The other bed is hidden beneath piles of rhinestoned fabric and street clothes. Otabek carefully hangs the gossamer armor and folds the yards of wildcat and watches the gemcut lines of Yuri’s frame shift from shadow to neon and back again. The acid glow has eaten away any semblance of skin. He can almost see the weight of Yuri’s bones in the ether.

They must be hollow, nothing more than hallucinations propped up by air and spite and the spring-clear bite of a violin.

Otabek misses the soft light of _shoji_ —the way it bathes Yuri’s skin in its almost-shadow, the way he swims in it, irreal, like water slipping up through the question of Otabek’s hands, quenching his thirst even as it encases him in ice.

#

While everyone prepared for Victor and Yuuri’s wedding, Otabek hid in the shade of the hydrangeas crowding the inner garden of Yuuri’s home. They had burst into color in the hot press of summer, but from deep within and under, Otabek could only see the cool darkness of their leaves.

The courtyard was quiet and still except for the sound of a _sozu_ fountain filling and emptying against rock.

 _Crack_.

Before he could rise to join the chaos bubbling out of the main hall, Victor and Yuuri appeared, waving the great sleeves of their kimonos against the heat. Thinking the courtyard theirs alone, they pressed their heads together and swayed in the sunlight.

They laughed, dancing like that. Through the lattice of the leaves, Otabek could see the sweat in their hair and the gold bands already shining from their hands. Only their faces descended into the shadow of the other.

These two people, so unashamed to invite the world into their pleasures and falls, were suddenly shut against even unseen eyes—a secret, perhaps, even to themselves.

_Crack._

Otabek stayed still in the hydrangeas long enough to see Yuri appear, socked feet silent on polished wood floors, sent, no doubt, to fetch the couple for their ceremony. But even Yuri could not bear to break them. He opened his mouth once, twice, before closing it and looking down at the palms of his hands, which he pressed together in worry—or, perhaps, a poor imitation of the scene folding in like a universe in front of him.

In that moment, Yuri’s face was soft.

Otabek felt free from the world then, sitting in the shade of the hydrangeas. The _sozu_ cracked in the distance.

#

They sat on his couch at midnight, stripped down to their boxers to appease the Almaty heat. Untouching, they shed their secrets.

Even covered in the dark stripes of the blinds where they broke the moonlight, Yuri was the sun in a cloudless sky.

“I’ll never be you,” he said. “Like you.”

“Do they hurt?” Yuri asked. Otabek looked down to the bruises bursting out along his hip. Knee. Ankle.

“I’m afraid it always will.”

#

After the wedding, Yuri and Otabek walked along the shore. They did not speak. They both, he imagined, were lingering in the patchwork light of the garden.

When Yuri laced their fingers together, all Otabek could see was the dark outlines between them, the kaleidoscope of hydrangea tucked behind Yuri’s ear. He felt as though he had been picked up out at sea.

#

Even later, in the not-light of the _shoji_ , they broke each other open and wondered at their borders, drawn anew. Still existent. The pressed them together, felt blindly along their jagged edges, refused to believe that anything could puncture the other.  

The first time.

#

A fable, from when Yuri was still and bright and Otabek would not have shared him with anyone: Nothing shattered, nothing wrent; just the steppe and a man and his horse. All with no beginning—the only possibility for endlessness.

Something vicious, masquerading as a dream.

#

Yuri’s rasp breaks the distance between their beds.

“You can’t break your way out of a shadow.”

#

Otabek jolts awake in the still-dark. Maybe there were no words at all. The curtains are closed, now, but he can see the curve of Yuri’s shoulder against them, his skin stripped of its ethereal glow. He would not dare to touch it.

#

Alone in the mountains south of Almaty, Otabek hiked underneath darkness dissected by stars and the myths men drew between them, invisible lines of lie, no sun to dissolve them. He had stolen out into the night to find something whole; instead, he came up short with an armful of everything, jam-packed into the fragile limits of the world so not even a trace of black remained. He slept under its blanket, let the shards sink into him so that when he saw himself again he was not human but dust.

The opposite of broken is something empty—the buildings of a city at midnight, a black-slicked sea, the space where the moon should be when it turns and gives itself completely to the sun.

#

He dreams of darkness so deep that none can tell the end of another.

#

Something soft descends, falls over him like petals a sheet glass lake. It paints him into impressionistic divide. Pours into him breath and something needed.

#

Everywhere he goes, the same question lurks—in the tessellated bloom of a hydrangea. The spiderweb veins of broken glass. Invisible threads that reach down from the sky and hang the world. Otabek will fall into himself a million times before he will ever escape.

#

When he asks the night, it does not answer. Only their breath breaks its silence.

#

But always—a brightness behind the cracks. Warm and weeping under the weight of itself. Is he weeping, now?

#

In St. Petersburg—

#

“Here?”

A press and hook of Yuri’s fingers, making space. It draws the light out of him until everything looks like one.

#

—staring into the stained glass city caught in the Neva—

#

A perverse pleasure, breaking—reversed, now. Nothing between them a point.

#

—Otabek thought not about stars or shards or falling—

#

Soft, soft, the shape of Yuri’s lips undoes him.

#

—but of something whole and sinking, just beyond his grasp, underneath the waves.

#

When Otabek wakes, he peers into dawn’s breaking. How, he thinks, will he find himself among this wreckage?

**Author's Note:**

> (Various typos have been fixed.)
> 
> On a practical level, I’m operating under at least one constraint here. Maybe you can guess. (Give my best to Oulipo.)
> 
> Concrit welcome…though anyone seeking a linear narrative or consolation should look elsewhere.
> 
> And thank you to [storylover92](http://storylover92.tumblr.com/) for helping with the sprawling first drafts of this. I wouldn’t have gotten to this point without your questions and thoughts and feedback. (For any interested, my initial conception of this was a 13 chapter, multi-day, fully casted disaster that never would’ve gotten finished.)
> 
> Feel free to [follow me on tumblr.](http://metaandpotatoes.tumblr.com/)


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